Double LP on Ghost Channel White Vinyl
Entirely mystified as to how I missed this one first time around in 2004, but then I suppose that's why labels like Numero exist. I spent a lot of time in the late 90s/early 00s obsessing over the Scottish underground that birthed Tacoma Radar, a shortlived post-rock-adjacent, slowcore leaning outfit of rotating characters that shared a Glasgow label with Camera Obscura and possessed more than a passing resemblance to the Delgados and were yet another expression of special musical understanding the Scottish and US underground seemed to share at the time. Right in my wheelhouse then, yet the name Tacoma Radar draws a blank. Of course, they wont be the first band to have been born in the wrong time and nor do I know everything about anything you'll be surprised to hear. Second hand market prices for OG copies of No-One Waved Goodbye seem to suggest the right moment could be now. Why is likely a mystery of the vagaries of the YouTube/TikTok algorthims, though their combination of dreampop melodicism, slow-driving sense of wonder and vaguely ecstatic Galaxie 500-isms are laser guided for a new generation of fans who have also made accidental stars of Duster. On reflection, 2004 is a strange year for this to have been released, a little too late for the Chemikal Underground-led explosion in Scottish guitar music, a little too early for anyone to be getting nostalgic for it - indeed 21 years earlier, they'd have been right in the sweetspot; 21 years later, they've found another one. Funny how, if you wait long enough, the wrong band at the wrong time end up sounding like just what you needed. As perverse as that is, it also contains its own strange kind of fleeting, reconcillatory hope. Worth clinging on to wherever you can find that.
FFO: The Delgados, Galaxie 500, Low, Red House Painter, Idaho
